That Night's Wife

That Night's Wife (1930) is another Yasujiro Ozu crime film from Eclipse Series 42: Silent Ozu-Three Crime Dramas. And like other early films there are visages of his later style, for example, there are several still life transitions used throughout the film. However, it is the youthful cinematic experimentation that always strikes me in the early films: camera pans, close ups and camera pull backs, and crane shots, because they are used so infrequently in his later films. In this film a desperate husband (Tokihiko Okada) is driven to robbery to get money to pay for the doctor of his ailing child. During the man hunt the ensues after his crime, he stops in at a payphone booth to check in with the doctor in a dramatic scene in which the police are closing in. He manage sot escape by taxi home, but it turns out the taxi driver was an undercover detective (Togo Yamamoto) who is determine dot bring him in. A tense evening standoff ensues when, the man's wife (Emiko Yagumo) turns the tables by using her husband's gun to prevent the detective from bringing him in until the morning when the doctor will arrive and give his prognosis on their daughter's sickness. It is a simple and melodramatic story that is told in a brisk 65 minutes.